Banks pumped more than title.placeholder 50bn in to companies running ‘carbon bomb’ projects in 2022

Banks pumped more than 50bn last year into companies whose giant “carbon bomb” projects could destroy the last chance of stopping the planet heating to dangerous levels, the Guardian can reveal.

The carbon bombs – 425 extraction projects that can each pump more than one gigaton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – cumulatively hold enough coal, oil and gas to burn through the rapidly dwindling carbon budget four times over. Between 2016 and 2022, banks mainly in the US, China and Europe gave .8tn in financing to the companies running them, new research shows.

The climate rhetoric did not match up with what was happening on the books, said Shruti Shukla, an energy campaigner at the National Resources Defense Council, which was not involved in the investigation. “We need to rapidly decline our production of fossil fuels and support for fossil fuels, whether that’s regulatory or financial.”